Get Started with Fabric: Create Your Workspace & Reports

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This article is an excerpt from the book, Learn Microsoft Fabric, by Arshad Ali, Bradley Schacht. Harness the power of Microsoft Fabric to develop data analytics solutions for various use cases guided by step-by-step instructions

Introduction

Embark on a journey to harness the full potential of Microsoft Fabric within Power BI. This article serves as your comprehensive guide, walking you through the essential steps to create your first Fabric workspace seamlessly. From understanding the fundamentals to practical implementation, we'll equip you with the knowledge and tools needed to optimize your data management and reporting processes. Get ready to elevate your Power BI experience and unlock new possibilities with Fabric-enabled workspaces.

Creating your first Fabric-enabled workspace

Once you have confirmed that Fabric is enabled in your tenant and you have access to it, the next step is to create your Fabric workspace. You can think of a Fabric workspace as a logical container that will contain items such as lakehouses, warehouses, notebooks, and pipelines. Follow these steps to create your first Fabric workspace:

1. Sign into Power BI (https://app.powerbi.com/).

2. Select Workspaces | + New workspace:

Figure 2.5 – Creating a new workspace

3. Fill out the Create a workspace form, as follows:

• Name: Enter Learn Microsoft Fabric and some characters for uniqueness.
• Description: Optionally, enter a description for the workspace:

Figure 2.6 – Create a workspace – details

• Advanced: Select Fabric capacity under License mode and then choose a capacity you have access to. If not, you can start a trial license, as described earlier, and use it here.

4. Select Apply. Th e workspace will be created and opened.

5. You can click on Workspaces again and then search for your workspace by typing its name in the search box. You can also pin the selected workspace so that it always appears at the top:

Figure 2.7 – Searching for a workspace

6. Clicking on the name of the workspace will open that workspace. A link to it will become available in the left-hand side navigation bar, allowing you to switch from one item to another quickly. Since we haven’t created anything yet, there is nothing here. You can click on +New to start creating Fabric items:

Figure 2.8 – Switching to a workspace

With a Microsoft  Fabric workspace set up, let’s review the different workloads that are available.

Copilot in Power BI

Power BI has several key components, including data transformation and data modeling, culminating in a visual report that end users will consume. The Copilot experience is centered around the visual storytelling and reporting aspects of Power BI. This materializes in three ways: report page creation, narrative generation, and improving Q&A.

Let’s look at each of these Copilot capabilities.

Creating reports with the Power BI Copilot

The most common use for Copilot with Power BI is likely to be for creating reports. There are two features that come together to build reports. The first analyzes the dataset to suggest content for your report by using table relationships and column names, while the second one helps you create intuitive reports quickly. Figure 11.30 shows an example where Copilot has suggested several report pages, each with a short description of what would be displayed:

Figure 11.30 – The Power BI Copilot page suggestions

If you like the page suggestions, simply click on the Create button and the report page will appear.

While a suggested set of report content is a good starting point, analysts often have a specific need to meet. You can have Copilot create a report from the criteria you provide using prompts as well. These can be as simple as “create a page that shows customer analysis” or more specific, such as “create a page to show the impact of each sales territory on profit and quantity sold.”

Figure 11.31 – Sales impact report created by Copilot

Once the report page is generated, Copilot cannot update the report, but you can interact with and modify the report as necessary. This is a great way to reduce the time to get started building reports.

A couple of other important things to note are that in addition to not being able to modify reports, Copilot will not allow you to specify specific visual types, apply filters, or change the report layout. All of these can be changed manually after the initial report generation. It is worth noting that users should not expect Copilot to filter results to a specific time period based on their prompt as an example.

Next, let’s look at the smart narrative.

Creating a narrative using Copilot

Visuals are a wonderful way to tell a story and give users the ability to explore data on their own. However, sometimes a narrative that summarizes what is being displayed in a report can be useful. It can not only tell a story but also provide some additional context and information for users.

To get started, open a report and add a narrative visualization to the report as shown in Figure 11.32. You will see two options; click on Copilot. Choose the type of summary you wish to produce and optionally select specific pages or visuals to include in the summary. Then click on Create.

Figure 11.32 – The report narrative generated by Copilot

After the narrative is generated, remember to always review the narrative for accuracy and adjust the prompt, if necessary, to produce more accurate results. In addition to summaries, you can ask it to highlight key information, customize the order in which the data is described to help convey importance, specify specific data points to include in the summary, and even generate impact analysis showing how different factors affect metrics on the report.

Report, page, and visual narratives are a great way to guide users through a report, especially if there isn’t a subject matter expert there to explain all the data.

Finally, let’s look at using Copilot to improve the Q&A visual.

Generating synonyms with Copilot

The Q&A visual has been dazzling users for years at this point. It is impressive to build a model, walk into the room, and tell users that they can use natural language to query their data without needing to build any visuals. This may not be as impressive as the Copilot functionality that we have today, but it is still a very useful tool in your Power BI visualization toolbelt.

One piece of important information for the success of Q&A is something called a synonym. These are end-user-specific ways to reference data. For example, a table in the data model may be called Dim Person, but you know that some report consumers always refer to these as “users.” Therefore, you would create a synonym that tells Q&A that when someone asks about users, they are really talking about persons. This can also be done on a column level. A synonym for “postal code” could be “zip code,” while a synonym for an “item” could be “product” or “finished good.”

Q&A itself may not use Copilot, but Power BI Desktop can leverage Copilot to generate synonyms. This can be done when creating a new Q&A visual by clicking on Add synonyms from the ribbon with the label Improve Q&A with synonyms from Copilot. They can also be generated from the Q&A settings menu by adding Copilot as a source from the Suggestion settings list.

The more synonyms that can be used to describe your data, the more likely you are to produce quality Q&A results. It is important to double-check the synonyms generated by Copilot to ensure they line up with your specific business terminology.

With these Copilot experiences for Power BI, you will be able to generate report ideas, report pages and visuals, summaries, and narratives, and improve Q&A.

Conclusion

In conclusion, by mastering the creation of Fabric workspaces in Power BI, you've laid a solid foundation for efficient data management and reporting. With Fabric's capabilities at your fingertips, you're equipped to streamline workflows, generate insightful reports, and enhance collaboration within your organization. Keep exploring the diverse functionalities of Fabric to continuously refine your Power BI experience and stay ahead in the realm of data analytics.

Author bio

Arshad Ali is a principal product manager at Microsoft, working on the Microsoft Fabric product team in Redmond, WA. He focuses on Spark Runtime, which empowers both data engineering and data science experiences. In his previous role, he helped strategic customers and partners adopt Azure Synapse and Microsoft Fabric.
Arshad has more than 20 years of industry experience and has been with Microsoft for over 16 years. He is the co-author of the book Big Data Analytics with Azure HDInsight and the author of over 200 technical articles and blogs on data and analytics. Arshad holds an MBA from the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington and an MCA from India.

Bradley Schacht is a principal program manager on the Microsoft Fabric product team based in Saint Augustine, Florida. Bradley is a former consultant and trainer and has co-authored five books on SQL Server and Power BI. As a member of the Microsoft Fabric product team, Bradley works directly with customers to solve some of their most complex data problems and helps shape the future of Microsoft Fabric. Bradley gives back to the community by speaking at events, such as the PASS Summit, SQL Saturday, Code Camp, and user groups across the country, including locally at the Jacksonville SQL Server User Group (JSSUG). He is a contributor on SQLServerCentral and blogs on his personal site, BradleySchacht.